So I downloaded every free FF mobile game I could find on the Android store. Talking about the actual mobile games, not PS1 games that were ported or whatever. Let's check both of the Brave Exvius games, here we go.
For my thoughts on FFXV: A New Empire and FF: Record Keeper, have a look here:
https://www.reddit.com/FinalFantasy/comments/i15qxq/mobile_games_some_thoughts_on_ffxv_a_new_empire/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x
For my thoughts on FF All the Bravest and Dissidia FF Opera Omnia, have a look here:
https://www.reddit.com/FinalFantasy/comments/idw5vt/mobile_games_some_thoughts_on_ff_all_the_bravest/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
FF Brave Exvius
Final Fantasy Brave Exvius. Released in 2015 and developed by A-lim/Gumi. Modeled after their previous game, Brave Frontier, but with more focus on the story. They got Yoshitaka Amano to do a bunch of promo art for this one.
Cool logo art! Actual new music that sounds pretty good actually! Cutscenes after every mission and a lot of story to drive the action! Compared to A New Empire especially, but Record Keeper as well, this feels even more like an actual game that has a story it wants to tell. Not just a gambling hall for fanservice. There's even areas where you get to walk around some times! It's pretty decent.
Apparently the story takes some turns later on, but it's pretty standard, inoffensive fantasy early on. Welcome to generic fantasy land where the elemental crystals are, one by one, being destroyed by a group of Evil Dudes in black armour. Two knights, Rain (your main guy) and his mentor and friend Lasswel, return from a mission only to find the earth crystal under attack. A mystery girl shows up and gives Rain the amazing power to summon fanservice from across the dimensions!
So now you get your roulette wheel ability to call upon the help of random Final Fantasy characters, some other cameos and some original characters. You get one free spin on the wheel each day, and can also spend whatever 'Lapis' currency you earn to unlock more characters! (Or spend actual real money of course). Build your party of five, raise their levels and gear. Throw some money at Square to unlock more gear, characters and powerups. You know the drill. You can also call upon the help of other players' main characters at the start of each mission. You'll be overpowered no matter what you do so it doesn't really matter how you build your team.
Rain the hothead has a fire spell, the cold and serious soldier Laswell has blizzard magic. Some though went into this! It's cute. Just like their bromance! These two are so very gay for each other. I mean, sure, they get a conversation early on where Rain talks about girls or whatever, to confirm for the audience that it's totally no homo. But it's pretty clear these dudes are into each other. Read all about it in my fanfic.
Anyway. The characters play off each other well. It's not always clear what tone the game is going for. And I wouldn't exactly call the dialogue funny. But it's all charming and lighthearted. Fina joins the gang later on, having lost her memories as the mystery girl that gave Rain his Vision powers. She's alright, a bit of an airhead so far. And there's more characters that join after that.
The writing is in no way on the level of an actual Final Fantasy game, but it's been good enough to keep me interested well beyond where the combat started to bore me. I mean, the dialogue and events are very cliche, but the bigger story is interesting enough to play for fifteen minutes here and there. Until I get bored of it and go back to whatever I was doing.
If anything, the pacing is a bit too slow and it takes long for things to happen. Yet every battle gets a little cutscene. So you have a lot of conversations that go nowhere and talk about nothing. "I sense a big monster up ahead". "It sure is cold here!" Etc.
So what do you actually do in the game? Combat gauntlets. It's like a more fleshed out version of Record Keeper. You travel from location to location on the world map. Each location has five or so missions. Each mission then consists of a chain of battles that you play back to back. This leads to interesting situations where your health and status effects carry over from one fight to the next. And you can use the first couple of battles to charge up your limit breaks or summons and unleash them on the inevitable boss in battle five.
You give commands to each of your party members at the same time. They all have a bunch of customisable skills, magic and items available. And then you execute all of them before the enemies get a turn. Timing your party's attacks can lead to chains which increase damage. Most fights are over before the enemy even realizes what's happening. But it feels really really satisfying to hand out commands, tap all your party members and watch them fill the screen with flashy explosions. So yeah. Simple battle system, but satisfying and with some unique twists to it that make it stand out compared to a standard turn based system. I assume that the actual challenging content is in the PVP Arena and the limited events, though the ones I played were still super easy.
Some locations on the world map have an optional dungeon area that you can freely explore for loot and side quests. And there are a few towns with shops, where you get to walk around, talk to npc's and pick up sidequests. The dialogue here is not very interesting, so I started skipping the towns after a while. You don't really need to buy better gear or items, even the extensive crafting system the game has, has been entirely unnecessary so far. There's a ton of levelling systems, ability upgrades etc to play with. I dabbled. And then moved on. I imagine it all gets more challenging later on?
You can send the characters you're not actively using on missions for loot and xp. There's an arena. And a bunch of themed events, re-enacting scenes and fights from other FF games.
And just like in Record Keeper, there's plenty of real money gambling to be done, but it can all be ignored pretty easily.
The music is all original and pretty good. Battle themes, world map music. It's good. The art looks good but feels a bit... I don't know. RPGMaker ish? Slapped together art assets from the generic "fantasy rpg" library. The vertical screen space does allow them to add really pretty backgrounds to battles, with moving clouds and distant vistas.
And the character sprites in combat are absolutely fantastic. Every single character gets a ton of unique animations and they have a lot of personality to them. I love my chocobo riding dude, one of the original characters, whose black chocobo just runs off and drags him off screen after every battle. It gets a bit hard to see what's happening when all your attacks are firing off at once. But credit where it's due, they spent a lot of effort on making hundreds of neat looking characters for this.
Also, it needs to be said. The menus are a nightmare once again. The log in screen is nice and clean, with pretty Amano art. After that it's just a cluttered mess of ads, notifications, every single pixel screaming for your attention. You get bombarded with literally four different "daily log in bonus" screens before they allow you into the main menu. And once there it takes me minutes staring at it to figure out where I want to be clicking. And I still get confused about which icon represents what. Thankfully, if you just want to play the story, there's a big "World" button that takes you to the world map, and you can ignore the dozen other menus completely.
Be prepared to see a lot of download and loading windows as well. You can turn some of this off. But the game regularly needs to download an extra 2MB, 8MB, 140MB of data for new environments, ads, whatever. After putting the game away for a day, I tried starting it back up only to get stuck for half an hour in loops of downloading, failing to log in, crashing, more downloading, etc. It eventually solved itself. But that's a bit counterproductive for a game that you should be able to jump in and just play whenever you have a minute to spare.
So yeah. I don't know. It's a decent game. I liked the cute style and tone of Record Keeper better, but there's definitely more depth to Exvius. The story feels like it will go places eventually. Don't expect deep character development or hugely original story beats. But this is a fine rpg to play if you're looking for a free one on your phone. Now onwards to the prequel! Sequel? ?
War of the Visions FF Brave Exvius
War of the Visions: Final Fantasy Brave Exvius. Developed by Gumi, based on their previous game The Alchemist Code, and released in 2019. A lot of money and effort went into this one. Oh how far mobile games have come.
Going by the naming scheme, this is a prequel. [googling...] Yes indeed it is! A long time ago in the world of Lapis, a bunch of kingdoms are in a precarious peace. Some hooded mystery folks fake a border dispute, pretending to be knights of Leonis, attacking a princess from Hourne. King Oelde Leonis drags along his son Mont Leonis to check it out. Mont Leonis has a magic ring that, just like in Brave Exvius, allows him to summon in 'Visions'. Characters from other FF games or original to this game, that fight alongside him in battle. Except this time, the battles are top down, turn based strategy! Like in FF Tactics.
And boy do they emulate Tactics with this game. Blonde prince Mont has a dark haired twin Sterne who turns to the dark side, for the obligatory bromance-turned-rivalry that was core to FF Tactics. Their kingdom is named after lions. And the entire tone and set up at the start feels like it's trying to hit that calm before the storm of the first chapter of FF Tactics. I played about the first two 'scenes' of the first chapter. Which means about twenty battles and cutscenes. Just like Brave Exvius, it drags a little some times and they stretch the story out with so many fights. The politics and mystery is intriguing enough though. It's neat and fairly well done, but the obvious comparison to FF Tactics doesn't do it justice and only emphasises just how much worse the writing is here. Even though it's all pretty decent if you look at it as its own thing.
Brave Exvius sounds like it went places later on, so this game might get way way more interesting later on as well. Or it might devolve into generic power fantasy good versus evil. Who knows. It starts out less cliché, less predictable than Brave Exvius or Record Keeper did, so it feels like it'll be less of a grind to get to the good stuff. With early set up for some twists and drama to come. War is gonna break out and everyone is gonna blame everyone while the hooded gang of mystery baddies snickers in the background, that's my prediction.
Anyhoo. The music is really good. They could do with some more variety. FF Tactics had like ten battle themes to shuffle around. This game has... a battle and a boss theme? The cutscenes and presentation are nice. The voice acting, is there. The writing is... good enough. It's better than Brave Exvius' writing was for sure. And I like that both these games genuinely seem to care about their stories. As I said, War of the Visions tries to go for a more serious tone, with political intrigue, scheming and all that. Just the dialogue itself is often stilted and cheesy. And the voice actors don't exactly put in a great effort to lift up the source material either. But hey, there's voice acting! For every mission! The cast for this game is huge.
So yeah, the game's production values are lovely. And it's all in pretty 3D graphics that actually looks like the concept art. I wouldn't mind a version of this to play on my Switch or PC. For lack of an actual FF Tactics sequel.
Ryuji Ohara does a fantastic Akihiko Yoshida impression with the character art. Filtered through a more anime/Fire Emblem style. Which is to say, all the character designs are beautiful and nice to look at. The 3D art tries to emulate the look of those CG cutscenes they did for FF Tactics: War of the Lions, including a sketch filter on the shadows and Yoshida's sketchy shading lines all over the characters. It looks cool! All of the art and design in this game is really well done.
Except, as is the trend for these mobile games it seems, the interface design and menus. They look nice, but are once again a nightmare to navigate. In battles things can get so cluttered it's hard to see where your units can move to. And it's often tricky to select the right tile or enemy. Especially since you're doing this by dragging your units around the screen with your fingers, they don't move tile-by-tile like in most turn based games like this, instead you have analog control and your units run around freely in every direction and often they just snap back to a previous tile they were on or they run back to a different tile when you were trying to tap which target to attack. It's fiddly. There's plenty of camera options so you can compensate for this thankfully, and there's no negative consequence for moving to the wrong tile. Just drag them back to where you wanted them.
In the main menu and all the various upgrade, equipment, crafting and slot machine screens, it's hard to find the information you need and the particular button you want to push. Again. Every button is equally screaming for your attention so the eyes don't know where to focus. I mean, just look at the main menu and see how long it takes you to find the button to continue the main story! You know, the main mode of the game that should be obvious and big and standing out? The only button that slightly stands out from the rest and grabs your attention just a bit more, is of course the slot machine where you go to gamble to unlock new characters. Because of course.
Ok sorry, enough rambling from my graphic designer brain. On to the rest of the game!
So, turn based, grid based, strategy battles. Like you'd see in FF Tactics, Fire Emblem, Into the Breach. It's a tried and true system, and this game's version is pretty good. It's a less punishing, slightly faster version of FF Tactics. And compared to the other mobile games I've played so far, the difficulty is decently balanced this time. I'm not instakilling every fight in one turn. I've even had some of my units knocked out. And the game requires you to position and move somewhat cleverly. It has jobs, skills, damage types and elemental stuff similar to FF Tactics. So spears can hit two tiles away and do piercing damage. Terrain height matters. Archers are a pain in the ass when they're up on a hill and out of reach of your melee units. Magic can hit multiple targets. Etc.
Unique to this game is that attacking will charge a unit's ability points which they can use to execute their stronger attacks. So your units start the battle with only their basic attack, and you have to attack a couple turns before you get to spam your stronger magic abilities. Mages do start a battle with some AP. And every unit has an element attached, for example earth, which would be weak to wind and strong against lightning enemies. So yea, strategic depth and enemies that don't go down in one hit so you might actually need to use some of that depth.
The maps/missions mostly take place in generic looking grassy hills and stuff. Haven't had a pretty church or bridge or iconic looking waterfalls like Tactics had. Again with the comparisons. But missions are well designed from a tactical perspective. The locations use height and cover pretty well, with funnels to lead enemies in to, corners to hide behind.
Besides the main story, which is just a straight line of cutscenes and battles. There's an optional mode where you can do side missions and slowly unlock different locations on a FF Tactics looking world map. And there's the usual special events with bossfights from other games in the series. Chocobo expeditions to send units away and find loot. A bunch of tutorial missions, pvp arena, pve coop missions, player guilds to join. Achievements, bonus objectives and literal bingo cards with challenges to unlock rewards. Log in bonuses. Features! And they'll probably add more, since this game only just released.
And there's big skill trees to unlock new abilities, each ability can then be upgraded separately, equipment can be crafted and upgraded, units can level, 'awaken', etc. Units can have multiple jobs. You can equip cards with bonus stats for that unit and the whole party, which adds some incentive to spec a character towards a certain role. For example you could give your thief lady a card that gives her higher accuracy, lower defence and raises dexterity for her entire team. In other words, lots and lots of customizability, and as far as I can tell, there's lots of different directions you can level each character. Not just 'make them stronger'. And of course lots of opportunities to get items and boosts for each character for real money or for the in-game currency you earn through playing.
Because of the slightly higher difficulty and complexity of the battles, I was more motivated to actually dive into all the leveling systems a bit more this time. Still not enough to make me throw money at it. It's still easy enough to overpower your characters and kill the challenge with all the free stuff you get. Nevermind the fact that, aside from your five person party you can invite another player's units to join you in the sixth slot. Just like in Brave Exvius. Except this time doing so will cost you gil. Units at your own level are cheaper, level 80 powerhouses will cost you all your savings. Which is a nice way to keep some balance. I chose to save my gil and do most of the battles with just my own units.
On the other hand, the second thing the godawful tutorial does is tell you how to turn on 'auto battle'. The first thing the tutorial does is show you how to spend currency to unlock characters. Almost like they want you to just spend money and not play the battles. And jeez. Tutorials in all these games are universally awful. Endless walls of text with too much information at once. While they just tell you to 'push this, ok now push this button' without actually explaining why you should do these things. Every time the game forces a tutorial on me it feels like someone ripping the phone from my hand and just playing the game for me while rattling off a bunch of information at me. And if you're unlucky, you can get stuck in a loop of one tutorial after the other explaining all the different menus and systems one at a time without time in between to process what it just showed you and try for yourself. The battle tutorials are the same way, just playing the fight for you and throwing terms and information at you without letting you practice and learn on your own.
Also, I wish all the neat side characters in my squad got some cutscenes and plot. The art oozes personality and I wanna get to know these cool gals and girls. But since most of them are blank 'Visions' you get through some non canon gambling menu, all the characterization is tucked away in a text box somewhere. And maybe some art cards you can unlock. Oh and the rarer units get a little quote and a short catwalk animation when you get them. It all hints at character, without actually writing a character. They have zero interaction with the actual plot or the main characters and I don't know who any of these people are. This was fine in Record Keeper and Brave Exvius where it was just Lightning and Squall fighting alongside me, and only a handful of original characters. But most of the units I've unlocked in this game so far have been originals.
But! Out of the four mobile games I've checked so far, this one is easily the most impressive by far. Beautiful presentation. It all feels like it could have been one of Square's DS or Playstation games. Instead of just a cheap mobile game. It has decent storytelling and a plot that seems like it isn't just a predictable lighthearted fantasy adventure, or whatever hollow void of emptiness A New Empire was. And most of all, a fun battle system that actually requires some effort! I'll definitely be playing more of this. And with this game, I don't get bored of it and have to stop playing after four battles. I actually spent an evening playing just this. It's no FF Tactics, or even Tactics Advance. But it's a good enough alternative.
Though beware, the fancy presentation comes at the cost of a lot of data and big downloads. Also, my phone gets really hot after a while. Also also, because of the slower battle system, missions take way longer than the short and sweet battles in Record Keeper or Brave Exvius. So it's a little harder to boot this game up for just a minute, do a short battle, and move on with your life a minute later. It requires a little more time commitment. You could of course pause the battle and come back to it. Or just auto battle if you're in a hurry. But know that this game is a little less built like a quick mobile game, and more like one of its slower tactics brethren.
(SQUARE-ENIX PLEASE IF YOU'RE READING THIS. GIVE YASUMI MATSUNO THE RESOURCES, DEV TEAM AND ENGINE FOR THIS GAME AND LET HIM MAKE WHATEVER HE WANTS WITH IT! please)
To be continued?
Next time, Dissidia Opera Omnia! And All the Bravest? And I'll probably play some more of War of the Visions. A little hesitant to throw €15,- at the two Dimensions games... All these other games have been free so far. I love the other FF games that Matrix Software has done, so I'm sure they're good.
Anyone actually finish the stories for these two Exvius games? Any opinions? Also, what is an Exvius?
Thanks for reading or scrolling past this post, enjoy the comments below.
submitted by RobinOttens to FinalFantasy [link] [comments] For my thoughts on FFXV: A New Empire and FF: Record Keeper, have a look here:
https://www.reddit.com/FinalFantasy/comments/i15qxq/mobile_games_some_thoughts_on_ffxv_a_new_empire/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x
For my thoughts on FF All the Bravest and Dissidia FF Opera Omnia, have a look here:
https://www.reddit.com/FinalFantasy/comments/idw5vt/mobile_games_some_thoughts_on_ff_all_the_bravest/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
FF Brave Exvius
Final Fantasy Brave Exvius. Released in 2015 and developed by A-lim/Gumi. Modeled after their previous game, Brave Frontier, but with more focus on the story. They got Yoshitaka Amano to do a bunch of promo art for this one.
Cool logo art! Actual new music that sounds pretty good actually! Cutscenes after every mission and a lot of story to drive the action! Compared to A New Empire especially, but Record Keeper as well, this feels even more like an actual game that has a story it wants to tell. Not just a gambling hall for fanservice. There's even areas where you get to walk around some times! It's pretty decent.
Apparently the story takes some turns later on, but it's pretty standard, inoffensive fantasy early on. Welcome to generic fantasy land where the elemental crystals are, one by one, being destroyed by a group of Evil Dudes in black armour. Two knights, Rain (your main guy) and his mentor and friend Lasswel, return from a mission only to find the earth crystal under attack. A mystery girl shows up and gives Rain the amazing power to summon fanservice from across the dimensions!
So now you get your roulette wheel ability to call upon the help of random Final Fantasy characters, some other cameos and some original characters. You get one free spin on the wheel each day, and can also spend whatever 'Lapis' currency you earn to unlock more characters! (Or spend actual real money of course). Build your party of five, raise their levels and gear. Throw some money at Square to unlock more gear, characters and powerups. You know the drill. You can also call upon the help of other players' main characters at the start of each mission. You'll be overpowered no matter what you do so it doesn't really matter how you build your team.
Rain the hothead has a fire spell, the cold and serious soldier Laswell has blizzard magic. Some though went into this! It's cute. Just like their bromance! These two are so very gay for each other. I mean, sure, they get a conversation early on where Rain talks about girls or whatever, to confirm for the audience that it's totally no homo. But it's pretty clear these dudes are into each other. Read all about it in my fanfic.
Anyway. The characters play off each other well. It's not always clear what tone the game is going for. And I wouldn't exactly call the dialogue funny. But it's all charming and lighthearted. Fina joins the gang later on, having lost her memories as the mystery girl that gave Rain his Vision powers. She's alright, a bit of an airhead so far. And there's more characters that join after that.
The writing is in no way on the level of an actual Final Fantasy game, but it's been good enough to keep me interested well beyond where the combat started to bore me. I mean, the dialogue and events are very cliche, but the bigger story is interesting enough to play for fifteen minutes here and there. Until I get bored of it and go back to whatever I was doing.
If anything, the pacing is a bit too slow and it takes long for things to happen. Yet every battle gets a little cutscene. So you have a lot of conversations that go nowhere and talk about nothing. "I sense a big monster up ahead". "It sure is cold here!" Etc.
So what do you actually do in the game? Combat gauntlets. It's like a more fleshed out version of Record Keeper. You travel from location to location on the world map. Each location has five or so missions. Each mission then consists of a chain of battles that you play back to back. This leads to interesting situations where your health and status effects carry over from one fight to the next. And you can use the first couple of battles to charge up your limit breaks or summons and unleash them on the inevitable boss in battle five.
You give commands to each of your party members at the same time. They all have a bunch of customisable skills, magic and items available. And then you execute all of them before the enemies get a turn. Timing your party's attacks can lead to chains which increase damage. Most fights are over before the enemy even realizes what's happening. But it feels really really satisfying to hand out commands, tap all your party members and watch them fill the screen with flashy explosions. So yeah. Simple battle system, but satisfying and with some unique twists to it that make it stand out compared to a standard turn based system. I assume that the actual challenging content is in the PVP Arena and the limited events, though the ones I played were still super easy.
Some locations on the world map have an optional dungeon area that you can freely explore for loot and side quests. And there are a few towns with shops, where you get to walk around, talk to npc's and pick up sidequests. The dialogue here is not very interesting, so I started skipping the towns after a while. You don't really need to buy better gear or items, even the extensive crafting system the game has, has been entirely unnecessary so far. There's a ton of levelling systems, ability upgrades etc to play with. I dabbled. And then moved on. I imagine it all gets more challenging later on?
You can send the characters you're not actively using on missions for loot and xp. There's an arena. And a bunch of themed events, re-enacting scenes and fights from other FF games.
And just like in Record Keeper, there's plenty of real money gambling to be done, but it can all be ignored pretty easily.
The music is all original and pretty good. Battle themes, world map music. It's good. The art looks good but feels a bit... I don't know. RPGMaker ish? Slapped together art assets from the generic "fantasy rpg" library. The vertical screen space does allow them to add really pretty backgrounds to battles, with moving clouds and distant vistas.
And the character sprites in combat are absolutely fantastic. Every single character gets a ton of unique animations and they have a lot of personality to them. I love my chocobo riding dude, one of the original characters, whose black chocobo just runs off and drags him off screen after every battle. It gets a bit hard to see what's happening when all your attacks are firing off at once. But credit where it's due, they spent a lot of effort on making hundreds of neat looking characters for this.
Also, it needs to be said. The menus are a nightmare once again. The log in screen is nice and clean, with pretty Amano art. After that it's just a cluttered mess of ads, notifications, every single pixel screaming for your attention. You get bombarded with literally four different "daily log in bonus" screens before they allow you into the main menu. And once there it takes me minutes staring at it to figure out where I want to be clicking. And I still get confused about which icon represents what. Thankfully, if you just want to play the story, there's a big "World" button that takes you to the world map, and you can ignore the dozen other menus completely.
Be prepared to see a lot of download and loading windows as well. You can turn some of this off. But the game regularly needs to download an extra 2MB, 8MB, 140MB of data for new environments, ads, whatever. After putting the game away for a day, I tried starting it back up only to get stuck for half an hour in loops of downloading, failing to log in, crashing, more downloading, etc. It eventually solved itself. But that's a bit counterproductive for a game that you should be able to jump in and just play whenever you have a minute to spare.
So yeah. I don't know. It's a decent game. I liked the cute style and tone of Record Keeper better, but there's definitely more depth to Exvius. The story feels like it will go places eventually. Don't expect deep character development or hugely original story beats. But this is a fine rpg to play if you're looking for a free one on your phone. Now onwards to the prequel! Sequel? ?
War of the Visions FF Brave Exvius
War of the Visions: Final Fantasy Brave Exvius. Developed by Gumi, based on their previous game The Alchemist Code, and released in 2019. A lot of money and effort went into this one. Oh how far mobile games have come.
Going by the naming scheme, this is a prequel. [googling...] Yes indeed it is! A long time ago in the world of Lapis, a bunch of kingdoms are in a precarious peace. Some hooded mystery folks fake a border dispute, pretending to be knights of Leonis, attacking a princess from Hourne. King Oelde Leonis drags along his son Mont Leonis to check it out. Mont Leonis has a magic ring that, just like in Brave Exvius, allows him to summon in 'Visions'. Characters from other FF games or original to this game, that fight alongside him in battle. Except this time, the battles are top down, turn based strategy! Like in FF Tactics.
And boy do they emulate Tactics with this game. Blonde prince Mont has a dark haired twin Sterne who turns to the dark side, for the obligatory bromance-turned-rivalry that was core to FF Tactics. Their kingdom is named after lions. And the entire tone and set up at the start feels like it's trying to hit that calm before the storm of the first chapter of FF Tactics. I played about the first two 'scenes' of the first chapter. Which means about twenty battles and cutscenes. Just like Brave Exvius, it drags a little some times and they stretch the story out with so many fights. The politics and mystery is intriguing enough though. It's neat and fairly well done, but the obvious comparison to FF Tactics doesn't do it justice and only emphasises just how much worse the writing is here. Even though it's all pretty decent if you look at it as its own thing.
Brave Exvius sounds like it went places later on, so this game might get way way more interesting later on as well. Or it might devolve into generic power fantasy good versus evil. Who knows. It starts out less cliché, less predictable than Brave Exvius or Record Keeper did, so it feels like it'll be less of a grind to get to the good stuff. With early set up for some twists and drama to come. War is gonna break out and everyone is gonna blame everyone while the hooded gang of mystery baddies snickers in the background, that's my prediction.
Anyhoo. The music is really good. They could do with some more variety. FF Tactics had like ten battle themes to shuffle around. This game has... a battle and a boss theme? The cutscenes and presentation are nice. The voice acting, is there. The writing is... good enough. It's better than Brave Exvius' writing was for sure. And I like that both these games genuinely seem to care about their stories. As I said, War of the Visions tries to go for a more serious tone, with political intrigue, scheming and all that. Just the dialogue itself is often stilted and cheesy. And the voice actors don't exactly put in a great effort to lift up the source material either. But hey, there's voice acting! For every mission! The cast for this game is huge.
So yeah, the game's production values are lovely. And it's all in pretty 3D graphics that actually looks like the concept art. I wouldn't mind a version of this to play on my Switch or PC. For lack of an actual FF Tactics sequel.
Ryuji Ohara does a fantastic Akihiko Yoshida impression with the character art. Filtered through a more anime/Fire Emblem style. Which is to say, all the character designs are beautiful and nice to look at. The 3D art tries to emulate the look of those CG cutscenes they did for FF Tactics: War of the Lions, including a sketch filter on the shadows and Yoshida's sketchy shading lines all over the characters. It looks cool! All of the art and design in this game is really well done.
Except, as is the trend for these mobile games it seems, the interface design and menus. They look nice, but are once again a nightmare to navigate. In battles things can get so cluttered it's hard to see where your units can move to. And it's often tricky to select the right tile or enemy. Especially since you're doing this by dragging your units around the screen with your fingers, they don't move tile-by-tile like in most turn based games like this, instead you have analog control and your units run around freely in every direction and often they just snap back to a previous tile they were on or they run back to a different tile when you were trying to tap which target to attack. It's fiddly. There's plenty of camera options so you can compensate for this thankfully, and there's no negative consequence for moving to the wrong tile. Just drag them back to where you wanted them.
In the main menu and all the various upgrade, equipment, crafting and slot machine screens, it's hard to find the information you need and the particular button you want to push. Again. Every button is equally screaming for your attention so the eyes don't know where to focus. I mean, just look at the main menu and see how long it takes you to find the button to continue the main story! You know, the main mode of the game that should be obvious and big and standing out? The only button that slightly stands out from the rest and grabs your attention just a bit more, is of course the slot machine where you go to gamble to unlock new characters. Because of course.
Ok sorry, enough rambling from my graphic designer brain. On to the rest of the game!
So, turn based, grid based, strategy battles. Like you'd see in FF Tactics, Fire Emblem, Into the Breach. It's a tried and true system, and this game's version is pretty good. It's a less punishing, slightly faster version of FF Tactics. And compared to the other mobile games I've played so far, the difficulty is decently balanced this time. I'm not instakilling every fight in one turn. I've even had some of my units knocked out. And the game requires you to position and move somewhat cleverly. It has jobs, skills, damage types and elemental stuff similar to FF Tactics. So spears can hit two tiles away and do piercing damage. Terrain height matters. Archers are a pain in the ass when they're up on a hill and out of reach of your melee units. Magic can hit multiple targets. Etc.
Unique to this game is that attacking will charge a unit's ability points which they can use to execute their stronger attacks. So your units start the battle with only their basic attack, and you have to attack a couple turns before you get to spam your stronger magic abilities. Mages do start a battle with some AP. And every unit has an element attached, for example earth, which would be weak to wind and strong against lightning enemies. So yea, strategic depth and enemies that don't go down in one hit so you might actually need to use some of that depth.
The maps/missions mostly take place in generic looking grassy hills and stuff. Haven't had a pretty church or bridge or iconic looking waterfalls like Tactics had. Again with the comparisons. But missions are well designed from a tactical perspective. The locations use height and cover pretty well, with funnels to lead enemies in to, corners to hide behind.
Besides the main story, which is just a straight line of cutscenes and battles. There's an optional mode where you can do side missions and slowly unlock different locations on a FF Tactics looking world map. And there's the usual special events with bossfights from other games in the series. Chocobo expeditions to send units away and find loot. A bunch of tutorial missions, pvp arena, pve coop missions, player guilds to join. Achievements, bonus objectives and literal bingo cards with challenges to unlock rewards. Log in bonuses. Features! And they'll probably add more, since this game only just released.
And there's big skill trees to unlock new abilities, each ability can then be upgraded separately, equipment can be crafted and upgraded, units can level, 'awaken', etc. Units can have multiple jobs. You can equip cards with bonus stats for that unit and the whole party, which adds some incentive to spec a character towards a certain role. For example you could give your thief lady a card that gives her higher accuracy, lower defence and raises dexterity for her entire team. In other words, lots and lots of customizability, and as far as I can tell, there's lots of different directions you can level each character. Not just 'make them stronger'. And of course lots of opportunities to get items and boosts for each character for real money or for the in-game currency you earn through playing.
Because of the slightly higher difficulty and complexity of the battles, I was more motivated to actually dive into all the leveling systems a bit more this time. Still not enough to make me throw money at it. It's still easy enough to overpower your characters and kill the challenge with all the free stuff you get. Nevermind the fact that, aside from your five person party you can invite another player's units to join you in the sixth slot. Just like in Brave Exvius. Except this time doing so will cost you gil. Units at your own level are cheaper, level 80 powerhouses will cost you all your savings. Which is a nice way to keep some balance. I chose to save my gil and do most of the battles with just my own units.
On the other hand, the second thing the godawful tutorial does is tell you how to turn on 'auto battle'. The first thing the tutorial does is show you how to spend currency to unlock characters. Almost like they want you to just spend money and not play the battles. And jeez. Tutorials in all these games are universally awful. Endless walls of text with too much information at once. While they just tell you to 'push this, ok now push this button' without actually explaining why you should do these things. Every time the game forces a tutorial on me it feels like someone ripping the phone from my hand and just playing the game for me while rattling off a bunch of information at me. And if you're unlucky, you can get stuck in a loop of one tutorial after the other explaining all the different menus and systems one at a time without time in between to process what it just showed you and try for yourself. The battle tutorials are the same way, just playing the fight for you and throwing terms and information at you without letting you practice and learn on your own.
Also, I wish all the neat side characters in my squad got some cutscenes and plot. The art oozes personality and I wanna get to know these cool gals and girls. But since most of them are blank 'Visions' you get through some non canon gambling menu, all the characterization is tucked away in a text box somewhere. And maybe some art cards you can unlock. Oh and the rarer units get a little quote and a short catwalk animation when you get them. It all hints at character, without actually writing a character. They have zero interaction with the actual plot or the main characters and I don't know who any of these people are. This was fine in Record Keeper and Brave Exvius where it was just Lightning and Squall fighting alongside me, and only a handful of original characters. But most of the units I've unlocked in this game so far have been originals.
But! Out of the four mobile games I've checked so far, this one is easily the most impressive by far. Beautiful presentation. It all feels like it could have been one of Square's DS or Playstation games. Instead of just a cheap mobile game. It has decent storytelling and a plot that seems like it isn't just a predictable lighthearted fantasy adventure, or whatever hollow void of emptiness A New Empire was. And most of all, a fun battle system that actually requires some effort! I'll definitely be playing more of this. And with this game, I don't get bored of it and have to stop playing after four battles. I actually spent an evening playing just this. It's no FF Tactics, or even Tactics Advance. But it's a good enough alternative.
Though beware, the fancy presentation comes at the cost of a lot of data and big downloads. Also, my phone gets really hot after a while. Also also, because of the slower battle system, missions take way longer than the short and sweet battles in Record Keeper or Brave Exvius. So it's a little harder to boot this game up for just a minute, do a short battle, and move on with your life a minute later. It requires a little more time commitment. You could of course pause the battle and come back to it. Or just auto battle if you're in a hurry. But know that this game is a little less built like a quick mobile game, and more like one of its slower tactics brethren.
(SQUARE-ENIX PLEASE IF YOU'RE READING THIS. GIVE YASUMI MATSUNO THE RESOURCES, DEV TEAM AND ENGINE FOR THIS GAME AND LET HIM MAKE WHATEVER HE WANTS WITH IT! please)
To be continued?
Next time, Dissidia Opera Omnia! And All the Bravest? And I'll probably play some more of War of the Visions. A little hesitant to throw €15,- at the two Dimensions games... All these other games have been free so far. I love the other FF games that Matrix Software has done, so I'm sure they're good.
Anyone actually finish the stories for these two Exvius games? Any opinions? Also, what is an Exvius?
Thanks for reading or scrolling past this post, enjoy the comments below.
